


Perennials

by busaikko



Series: The Lost Language of Flowers [4]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Community: non_mcsmooch, Domestic, Earth, Established Relationship, Gay Male Character, Homecoming, M/M, POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-04
Updated: 2010-06-04
Packaged: 2017-10-09 21:56:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/92020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/busaikko/pseuds/busaikko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Domestic snapshots from annual visits to Earth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perennials

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SecondSilk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondSilk/gifts).



> I know nothing about gardening; feel free to correct any errors.

"So look," John says, stopping whatever he'd been doing in the kitchen to climb over the back of the sofa (God help him if David's mother ever saw) and settle in. He sits on the cushion next to David, not touching, with his knees wide and his forearms on them, hands clasped together and face intent as he studies the fireplace.

David's been bracing for this for days, now. This is the second time John's stayed with him at his parents' house, and John's not relaxed and comfortable. He's quiet: polite and distant when people talk to him, but keeping to the sidelines. There have been enough relatives visiting -- cousins, aunts and uncles, David's sisters, his nephews and nieces -- that the general uproar has let John's silence go unnoticed. Mostly.

The two other long-term relationships that David's been in both ended on good terms. He's still friends with Seth, and Ben sends him an annual non-denominational holiday card with a studio photo of him, his wife, and their two children. Acrimonious break-ups aren't David's style, and he can't see John being dramatic over, well, anything. But he wasn't friends with John before they started seeing each other; he's afraid that if John breaks up with him, John will just flow away like water and be gone.

"What?" David says, short, and sees John's eyes round with wariness, just for a second. "Sorry," he says, and reaches over to rub the back of John's shoulder. He starts to say that it's been a long week, then blinks and amends that to, "a long four and a half days."

John nods, accepting and easy, but beneath David's hand he's hard and tense.

"I've been talking to your. . . cousin?" John gave up on figuring out the family tree after the first barbecue last year. "Charlie, the one with the big glasses. And I was thinking, I thought," he takes a breath, "how would you feel about getting a house?"

David is absolutely, utterly blindsided. He has no idea what his face looks like when John shoots him a wary glance. John's expression is immediately shuttered.

"It was. Never mind," John says, and David talks over him, saying, "I would _love_ that."

He moves closer to John because John is fairly well rooted in place, and turns the neutral shoulder touch into a full-blown hug. After a stiff minute, John sighs and turns and kisses David on the forehead.

David knows John won't call him on being bad-tempered, but John will remember and maybe leap to his own wrong conclusions. He thinks about man-handling John into an embrace, but opts for the lazy out of just stretching along the sofa with his head in John's lap. John looks instinctually at the doors before putting one hand on David's chest and threading the other into his hair.

"I thought you were unhappy," David says, shutting his eyes. "You've been quiet. Even for you."

He can hear John breathing like he's about to speak, swallowing the words down, opening his mouth again, reconsidering, but he waits until finally John says, "You love your parents. _I_ love your parents. The house Charlie mentioned, it's a ten minute walk from here. It's just that sometimes I want to be with you. Have a place that I can come home to." He stops there. David imagines him biting his lip the way he does when he's frustrated.

David half-sits and pulls John down and kisses him until John forgets that someone might walk in at any moment and lets David sprawl out on top of him. David's turned on and reckless and not sure why until he realizes that this is the most romantic moment of his life, bar none.

He tells John this, and John goes red and pinch-faced with embarrassment, and David kisses him again.

* * *

The first year, John's addicted to catalog shopping. David doesn't care about interior decorating, but he puts up with being asked about curtains and dishes and tables because it makes John happy, for some reason. He's also amused that John, who likes his metaphorical closet clean, well-lit, and locked from the inside, doesn't think there's anything at all stereotypically gay about his passionate discussions with Rodney McKay about the threadcount of sheets.

But when David goes home for the first time, he's amazed at what John managed to do, all the way from another galaxy, with cousin Charlie's help.

Their house is eighty years old, two stories with a finished attic. The first floor was converted into an apartment by the previous owner, and is occupied by a woman who teaches political science at the university. Their front door is marked 336B, and leads to a staircase up to the living room.

David thought their rooms, unoccupied most of the year, would be like a hotel suite: impersonal, tidy, and sterile. But the first thing he sees are pictures of his family lining the hallway, and then he's fingering his books, haphazard in the living room bookshelf, and then he's in the bedroom, tumbling John onto sheets so fine they feel like silk, and the dresser and desk are the ones from the room he grew up in, worn and battered and perfect.

They spend half of their week of leave entertaining and showing off the house, and the other half in bed.

* * *

The second year, they are home in April, and David takes advantage of having lots of local cousins, nieces, and nephews to coerce them all into landscaping the yard. John is wary of plants (and David often superstitiously thinks that plants are wary of John), but he keeps everyone supplied with tea and sandwiches while they work, and is amenable to heading off to Home Depot at the drop of a hat.

David has been designing the garden for the house ever since the last time they were home; the patchy lawn is an embarrassment of crabgrass. He knows that despite hiring Cousin Marcia's middle girl to come by once a week to weed, water, and cut the grass, the plants will still take over. He puts in _Helleborus orientalis_ with ferns, ground ivy (_Glechoma hederacea_), muscari, scillas, and chionodoxa, which he thinks will do well with the acidity of the soil. The downstairs tenant says she likes tulips, so John scrubs out the big pottery planters that were left in the basement and David lines the front walk with pots of _Tulipa_ Early Glory and Maureen. John insists they need begonias, because he's perverse that way, so David plants _B. metallica_. While working with cousin Charlie to rip out the wilderness of _Rhododendron ponticum_ down by the back fence, David finds winter hazel and _Ribes sanguineum_ and a bedraggled _Cornus mas_, which he hopes can be coaxed into splendor with a little love and care.

John makes David walk him through the garden in the evenings, after everyone has been fed a final round of snacks and sent home. John asks for the Latin names of all the plants and what they're good for, and invariably forgets the name but has near-perfect recall of everything else.

"It will look completely different next year," David tries to impress on John, who tends to wrinkle his forehead as he looks at bare dirt and scraggly seedlings.

"I trust you," John says, and slides his hand into the back pocket of David's jeans, bumping their hips together.

* * *

The third year, the war with the Wraith is raging. David is evacuated back to Earth. He teaches seminars in xenobotany over the spring and summer sessions at the local university; in July the SGC sends him a new contract, asking him to come to Colorado in mid-September. He has four terse e-mails from John over those seven months. The ZPM situation is critical, David knows that; he also knows that any correspondence from Atlantis is read by censors. He has at least one e-mail every day from Rodney McKay, who is in Area 51 designing weapons or something. Rodney can't tell David anything classified.

John shows up unexpectedly the second to last week of August, dropped off at the curb by a black government SUV. He's strung out on amphetamines and paces the living room restlessly. David makes him take a shower and shave. John has clothes in the dresser, but the last time they were here was still long-sleeve weather. David brings John a pair of his own shorts and a t-shirt. John startles when David opens the bathroom door, bringing the towel up in a defensive reflex.

John's _thin_ and hard-muscled. Strangely, David's not that upset by John's ribs or the fact that the slight middle-aged bulge of his stomach's been replaced by a hollow, but he is shaken by the way John's neck is thinner, and his forearms. His hands look too big, and John looks brittle.

They don't talk about Atlantis over dinner, and afterwards John wants to have sex. "There's no way I'm going to get it up," he says in warning, when David's kissing him and touching him on the way to the bedroom. "I just. . . I need to feel you."

David doesn't want to be selfish, and he says so. John just snorts, pulling off David's shirt, and says David's not the selfish one.

David falls asleep sweaty and sated and wrapped around John, and he wakes up in the middle of the night to find John gone. John's clothes aren't on the floor and the toilet light's off, so David puts on his own pants and goes looking. He finds John in the back yard, curled up on the strip of grass between the brick walk and the fern border. David goes back inside, grabs a blanket, and takes it out to drape over John so that he doesn't catch cold, but John's awake when he gets there.

"Blanket?" David asks, and John put a hand on David's ankle and tugs. David spreads the blanket on the grass and they both stretch out, looking up at the brilliance of stars.

* * *

The fourth year, they celebrate David's forty-fifth birthday early; so that he can collect as many presents as possible, John says. There's nothing that David really needs, and he tells everyone so, but somehow this gets translated into _just bring food_. At one point, there are three casseroles in the refrigerator, along with two cakes and six loaves of home-baked rosemary bread. Enough people pass through the house that none of this bounty goes to waste.

John gives David early-birthday sex and an appointment with a lawyer who specializes in same-sex couples' estate planning. David hates to think that any of the documents they are having prepared might be necessary, and he doesn't know if he'd ever risk John's career and/or veteran's benefits by using his medical power of attorney. But John seems oddly cheered by the process. In the elevator on the way back down to the car, David asks why, and John shifts on his feet and looks guilty.

"Well," John says slowly. "It's the closest we can get to being married." He shrugs and bites his lower lip, a habit that David hasn't been able to break yet. "I love you," John says, and then the doors slide open and John's walking fast through the lobby, already digging the car keys out of his jeans pocket.

"I'm driving," David tells him when they get to the car, and John flips the keys over without protest. David gets in and buckles up and pretends he doesn't know where John's Johnny Cash CD got to. "Come here," he says, putting one hand around the back of John's neck and pulling him close, so that their foreheads touch. "I love you, too."

"I know," John says, and kisses David; right there, in the car, in broad daylight on a Tuesday morning, when back on Atlantis John is so careful, all the time.

David kisses back and then lets John go. "So now the question is, what am I going to get you for your birthday?"

"Socks," John says comfortably, leaning back and stretching his legs.

"Essential yet cheap," David agrees. There's only one thing that he thinks John needs, and that's his family. David doesn't know how hard it will be to get Ronon and Teyla and Rodney and their families to Earth, to their house, all at the same time, and preferably while it's still warm enough to barbecue, but he has a year for planning and machinations.

David's been to too many weddings to count. He prefers the traditional Christian vows: _to have and to hold, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish 'til death do us part._ Part of him has always envied people who can stand in front of people who love them and swear their love, and honeymoons are a great idea. But. . . .

John ran his ten kilometers this morning and pulled the dandelions from the front yard before waking David up to shower. There are still chlorophyll stains on John's fingers. David washed John's hair. In a week they'll both be back in Pegasus. Even with the Wraith no longer a major threat John still gets shot at far more often than David is comfortable with; but this afternoon they are going to the photography studio to look at the proofs for pictures to put on the non-denominational holiday cards that they'll send to family and friends.

"Stop worrying about whatever you're worrying about," John says, as they're pulling into the driveway. "Hey -- did you notice I weeded?"

"You only told me four or five times," David says, grabbing the mail while John's unlocking their front door. "When exactly did we get married?"

John turns around on the stairs to look down at him. "It's an ongoing process," John says, and nods once before continuing up.

"Take off all your clothes and get in the bedroom," David calls after him. "You owe me a honeymoon."

John laughs and shouts back something that sounds like _yeah, right_, and David thinks about having and holding, loving and cherishing, as he flips the advertising circulars onto the table and follows the trail of John's clothes.

end


End file.
